UN Maps Women’s Progress in Access to Justice

On a day when newspapers highlighted the Indian capital’s high rate of sexual assault on women, a new report released Wednesday by UN Women, an organization under the United Nations that works for gender equality, provided another reminder that access to justice is limited for women.

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Despite the progress made worldwide in improving women’s legal rights, a lot more work is needed to make sure that laws don’t just exist on paper.

The report looked at the range of legal protections available to women from the workplace to the home, covering issues like marital rape, domestic violence and inheritance rights, among others. The report said that while equality is guaranteed in the Constitutions of most of the countries it looked at, “inadequate laws and implementation gaps make these guarantees hollow promises, having little impact on the day-to-day lives of women.”

Its authors said that despite the progress made worldwide in improving women’s legal rights, a lot more work is needed to make sure that laws don’t just exist on paper.

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The report has some appalling figures that reveal more than 600 million women in the world – more than half of the world’s working women – are trapped in vulnerable jobs and are paid less than their male counterparts, owing to inadequate labor laws. And while two-thirds of the countries have laws on domestic violence, 127 countries do not have effective laws on marital rape.

The report said that for many of these crimes, the justice chain – the steps that women have to take to access the formal justice system – is so complex that it often leads plaintiffs drop cases before they ever come to trial. And due to the stigma around certain crimes, such as rape, these are not reported to begin with. The report estimates that globally only 17% of reported cases reach the court; of those that are reported, only 4% end in conviction.

“Lack of knowledge of their rights or the justice system, dependence on male relatives for assistance and resources, and the threat of sanction or stigma are some of the social barriers that women face in accessing the formal justice system” globally, the report stated.

The report also said that women are underrepresented amongst those dispensing justice, such as judges, and this can also affect the kind of justice that women expect to receive in courts of law. In India, the proportion of women judges stands at a mere 3% (women average 27 percent of judges worldwide).

The report provided some surprising comparative figures for India and its region, some of which appeared to back the report’s call for legislative reforms, among other measures to improve women’s rights.

When it comes to politics, India trails Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan in female participation at the top. While 11% of India’s Parliament is female, the figure for Bangladesh is 19%, for Pakistan is 21%, and for Nepal is 33%. Each of these three countries has a quota for women’s participation in the national Parliament; last year India tried to pass legislation to set up such a quota but was unsuccessful.

The report recommended increasing the numbers of women in law enforcement, providing specialized services that aid women with legal procedures and understanding their rights, and providing training to judges.

But the report suggests that even while calls for gender equality have increased, the funding to make such projects feasible hasn’t matched up. The report said that in the last decade, the World Bank has allocated $857 billion to grants and loans, out of which $126 billion went into public administration, law and justice systems, but only $7.3 million went into programs aimed at gender equality – that’s a mere 0.001% of the total budget.

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